It may lack iMovie's nifty trailers feature, but Pinnacle Studio for iPad replaces Avid Studio as the most powerful and easy-to-use video editing app for the iPad.

With Corel's purchase of the Pinnacle video editing software assets from Avid last summer, my Editors' Choice iPad video editing app, Avid Studio, is no longer supported. The good news, however, is that the app has been reborn as Pinnacle Studio for iPad. Unfortunately, existing Avid Studio users don't get a free update to Pinnacle Studio, even though it's essentially the same app. To add insult to injury, what was a $4.99 app is now $12.99. That doesn't take away the fact that it's the best, most powerful, and easiest to use iPad video editor around. And this version is even better than its forbear in several ways, among them 1080p output and a voiceover feature.

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Setup and InterfaceUsers of first-generation iPads need not apply, as Pinnacle only runs on iPad 2 or later. The app's 57.3MB is large by iOS app standards, but much smaller than Apple's iMovie for iPad ($4.99, 3.5 stars), which takes up a massive 496MB.

When you first start Pinnacle Studio, you'll see its attractive movie-film-styled home screen, from which you can start, open, share, or delete movie projects. You can also access help from here (and only here), and set default durations for titles, transitions, and photos you add to movies. Once you open or start a project, you'll see the standard three-panel video editing interface, with source tray and preview window on the top, and a storyboard and timeline across the bottom.

To add a clip to your movie timeline, you drag its thumbnail down from the source panel down to either the storyboard or timeline. You get just one video track but up to three audio tracks. Pinnacle's toolbar along the left makes common editing options obvious, with buttons for the clips, images, sound, transitions, montages, and text. A record button lets you start recording new video from the iPad's camera.

Pinnacle Studio rearranges the display nicely when you switch from portrait to landscape orientation. It nearly fills the top half of the screen with the project video preview, and you can pinch and unpinch to contract and expand the timeline. Neither Pinnacle nor iMovie for iPad lets you resize the interface panels, but Pinnacle does let you view projects in full screen right from the editing area, while iMovie makes you go back to the home project page. For icing on the cake, Pinnacle displays the current frame's time code at the top, though this is probably not of interest to the average iPad video editing enthusiast.

For some interface actions, Pinnacle Studio is more intuitive than iMovie. For example, Pinnacle's garbage can icon makes it clearer how to remove a clip, and its razor icon is more intuitive than iMovie's swiping down to split a clip. Pinnacle also shows both storyboard and timeline view, while iMovie only shows its hybrid thumbnail-timeline view—unless you hold your finger down on a clip's entry, when it changes into a movable storyboard thumbnail. Pinnacle's way makes arranging clips much easier.

A couple of minor annoyances, however, detract from Pinnacle Studio's appeal: in order to see a lot of the effects you apply in action, you have to wait for a sometimes lengthy rendering process, and when opening a project, you'll often be asked to rebuild its media library. These operations usually took about half a minute on my 3rd generation iPad; users of the newer model make experience shorter wait times. Fortunately, the rebuild library message doesn't appear every time you open a project, and I encountered no crashes during editing in the new app.

Basic EditingPinnacle makes it easy to trim and split clips. You simply tap the clip you want to edit in the timeline (or its storyboard thumbnail), and drag a handle at the bottom in the direction you want to trim. Double clicking the edit point in the timeline brings up the precision editor. Here, you can actually specify the number of frames to move the edit left or right. The edits are of the "ripple" type, meaning you don’t have to worry about empty holes in your timeline—all the clips move to fill the space.

Pinnacle adds a bunch more transition options over its Avid forebear. Applying transitions to your movie is a simple matter of hitting the lightning icon and choosing from the four dissolve and 12 push styles. Apple iMovie restricts you a cross dissolve or to an (often goofy) "theme transition", but a third app, ReelDirector ($1.99, 2.5 stars) offers the most transition options, with various versions of flash, blur, push, and wipe added to the two basic ones offered by Pinnacle.

When it comes to sound, Pinnacle and iMovie are pretty close, and it now joins Apple's editor and ReelDirector with the ability to record voice-overs. The microphone icons starts up the voiceover tool, with 3-2-1 countdown beeps. After you've recorded, Pinnacle lets you adjust the voice-over volume and fade it in and out—just as it lets you do with all other sound tracks. Pinnacle and Apple also offer sound effects such as applause, barking dogs, birds, even bear growls! And both apps show you audio waveforms below your clips in the timeline.

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About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

Pinnacle Studio 2.0 (for iPad)

Pinnacle Studio 2.0 (for iPad)

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